


Tangent

by 28ghosts



Series: Return [2]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, D/s undertones, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-29
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-27 18:49:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8412658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/28ghosts/pseuds/28ghosts
Summary: By the time you move to America, all you dream of is the same man.(Reincarnation AU)





	

**Author's Note:**

> companion piece to Recurrence, though you don't need to have read Recurrence for this to make sense!

You don’t remember learning gymnastics any more than you remember first dreaming in English. Before you can remember, you know how to stick a landing, and when the English teacher assigns everyone English names, yours rolls easy off your tongue: Billy. The young white teacher’s eyes light up when you say it back to her. You probably say ‘Billy’ better than she can say your real name, Soo-hyuk, but you’re too young to find that ironic. A few months later, your parents hire an English tutor. Your mother is proud of how quickly you take to the language: another thing you’re a natural at. There’s talk, you later remember, of maybe teaching you Chinese, but as your coach gets more serious, starts mentioning the Olympics, the notion vanishes. 

The dreams don’t. The dreams stick around. The older you get, the more you dream of -- as a child, it’s just riding, shooting guns. Fun things, mostly. Sometimes there’s nightmares about being outnumbered and outgunned and abandoned or murdering men you know you hate but can’t figure out why. 

By the time you move to America, all you dream of is the same man.

The man you dream of loves you so entirely it seems reckless. It should be frightening to be someone’s entire world, but in the dreams it’s not frightening at all because he’s your world, too, even if you’re less florid about demonstrating it. You can ride together for days and talk easily or let settle some comfortable silence for hours at a time without feeling strange. You hold him close when he wakes up terrified -- you both know the quickest, most comfortable way to press your bodies together as close as possible, and you know how to hold tighter when he’s quieter and stiller because that means he’s too terrified to move, not that he’s well. And he knows when you’ve dreamt uneasily of home, somehow, though you never figure out how he knows, and he’s boisterous those mornings, over-doting with easy touch and compliments, and you pretend his flirting annoys you but after all these years it never really does, and he knows that, too.

He drinks too much. It took you two years to get him to admit to his nightmares, not that he was fooling you, not that he ever thought he was fooling you. But he’s a proud bastard, and you bleed for each other dozens of times before he’ll let you roll him a cigarette in the aftermath of a bad dream, before he’ll admit he could use it. And to be fair, it’s longer before you unspool your own sad story for him: the home you’ll never return to, the horror of the boat ride over, the men you killed. And it’s longer yet before you each relax into each others’ touches. It takes so long for everything else to fade to insignificance -- the strange embarrassment of being a man resting your head on someone else’s shoulder, of letting anyone tuck your long hair behind your ears, the vague humiliation of wanting to be wanted, of needing someone else to mirror your own desire back to you.

But you get there. The man you dream of is transparent in his pleasure: always the same unabashed, unflinching moan when you slide into him, the vocal praise you sometimes have to stifle with a hand over his mouth when you’re in rented rooms but which he mumbles against your palm anyways, the way he sighs happily whenever he manages to undo your belt and grab your cock. Over the course of the first few months you spend fumbling and rutting against each other, it emboldens you slowly, draws something out of you, and suddenly you’re someone comfortable being fucked or sucking cock or jerking yourself off in front of him because he’s always, always so quick to praise.

It’s not that he completes you. No, he draws out parts of you that you didn’t know were there. He cuts your hair when it gets too long and tells you the story of Samson. You watch him shave afterwards and once he’s done you lean against his back and look at the both of you in the mirror, and you kiss his neck and tell him you’re going to fuck him and you want him to be silent the entire time and watch in the mirror, and you tell him, buried all the way inside him, that he’s all yours, isn’t he perfect and pretty, and you’re proud when he comes so hard you have to hold him up to keep him from collapsing. 

Afterwards you split cigarettes, and he curls up with his head on your chest, tracing patterns on your ribs. You like the huff of his breath on your skin. You lie there so long all wrapped up in each other than the sun sets. You start to sit up to light the room’s oil lamps, and he makes a small complaining noise but lets you get up. When you climb back into bed, you laugh a little at the way he’s staring at you, all appreciative and hungry. He grins back at you and tells you he loves you, then nestles back in against your chest like he’s not expecting a response. It takes you a few minutes to respond, but yes, you love him too, so much it feels insulting to say out loud.

Together, in public, you’re always hiding, but there’s so much you learn you can get away with -- when everyone’s drunk, you can lean into each other like you’ve been crowded into it; he can keep his hand braced on the back of your chair, able to rub his knuckles into your back. You’re so bold sharing cigarettes you expect someone to someday say something about it. It never happens, and when you’re safely hidden away together again, the giddiness of what you can steal from each other with everyone else watching none the wiser makes you feel half-drunk.

When you wake unable to remember his name, well -- you never feel lonelier than that.


End file.
